Remember: when everything is important, nothing is.

Importance only exists in relation to something else. If spending time with your partner and spending time with your children are both equally important—but you can only choose one—what do you do?

You have to decide what’s more important, if not eternally, then at least in this moment.

Sometimes it’s a juggling act. A prioritization play. One thing demands your attention now—urgent and important—while others are simply important, or just urgent. You can't do it all.

In the workplace, when everything’s on fire, you can’t put it all out. Multitasking? It’s mostly a myth. At best, it spreads your attention thin. At worst, it burns people out.

If you're in a critical meeting and answering Slack messages, you’re doing both badly. Maybe you can juggle for a while. But eventually, you drop something.

Still, sometimes you have to juggle. Organizations don’t always give you the space to do an A+ on a few things and an F on the rest. Often, you're forced into a string of C-minuses just to survive.

But the long game? The trick to surviving chaos is intentional prioritization.
To deliberately choose what matters when—and then protect that choice.

Move as many things as possible from urgent and important to important but not urgent.
That’s where leverage lives.

I’m feeling this hard in my current role. There’s a never-ending stream of client questions—some vague, some complex, some that require tapping other teammates. There's pressure to build trust, to “partner” with every client.

But here's the risk: solving all their problems may feel helpful—but it’s not always the highest-leverage move. Especially if the answers are already available to them, or if solving one key problem would move the needle more than answering ten small ones.

When there’s noise everywhere, it’s hard to know where to focus. But that’s the work.

Sometimes, you’ll guess wrong. Sometimes, you’ll get criticized for letting something slip. But you still have to choose.

Choosing what matters most—even without perfect information—is part of the job.
And doing one thing well is almost always better than half-doing everything.